Tito Beltran: Chile's opera prince.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Music

Sometimes it is talent alone that insures an artist's success. But more often it is the role that any number of intangible factors play that elevates one from the ranks of the unknown to stardom. In the case of Tito Beltran, the opera tenor who has been hailed as the Caruso of Chile, it is a fortuitous combination of boundless natural skill and life-shaping, but wholly unplanned, circumstances.

"I say to my mother and father 'thank you' for having me at just the right time," the thirty-year-old native of Punta Arenas laughs. "The doors are open everywhere because they need more tenors. In Sweden, where I've lived for ten years, they didn't have any to speak of when I arrived. When I went to London to continue my formal training, they had maybe one. So, I came along at just the right time!"

Indeed, had he been born a decade or two earlier, Beltran would have been thrown into competition with the likes of Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Luciano Pavarotti, and other reigning tenor kings of today. Thankfully, the scarcity of talented young tenors to fill important roles has led to one high profile engagement after another. Finalist in 1993 of the prestigious Cardiff Singer of the World competition, he has appeared in productions of La Boheme, Rigoletto, La Princesse Du Trebisonde, and other works in the major opera houses of Europe in recent years, and has released two critically acclaimed albums with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Beltran is scheduled to perform his North American debut with the Michigan Opera in Detroit, April 28 and May 4, singing Puccini's La Boheme. An appearance with the San Francisco Opera will follow.

The world's hard-to-please opera establishment has taken notice. "Of great promise is the young Chilean Tito Beltran," raved London's Sunday Times. "His tenor is shapely, strong, and booming." Classic CD Magazine lauded him as "opera's new golden boy . . . an exciting, charismatic singer." Classical Pulse! Magazine, in its review of his debut album, cited the singer's "substantial beauty at the top of the voice" and his ability to put "every ounce of energy and heart into his singing."

But had it not been for a love of music in the home and political discontent in his homeland, Beltran might be little more than an obscure pop singer today. One day, his father brought home a video about the life of opera legend Enrico Caruso starring Mario Lanza. For a youngster growing up in one of the world's most isolated cities at...